Abstract

This article works through a set of studies that link racial and spatial control in
explaining mutations of state-sanctioned and extralegal racism in concrete
geographical conjunctures in the contemporary world. Critical human geography
is particularly well poised to contributing to a broader debate about how to
research racial formations beyond ideology, through materiality, embodiment and
spatiality. Barbed wire, concentration camps, prison booms, aerial bombing, and
the War on Terror are examples of material and geographical formations that must
be explained beyond attention to social construction. Indeed, these technologies
of power demonstrate the strength of state-sanctioned racism in our time, and
the importance for critical scholarship to write with various forms of suffering
in the ruins of contemporary racism, if we are to be able to understand new
forms of anti-racism in the making.